Circumstance review

Atefeh Nikohl Boosheri , a 16 -year-old middle-class girl in Tehran, falls for a less-privileged classmate in this melodramatic debut from US-Iranian writer/director Maryam Keshavarz.

She offers a revealing portrait of an underground youth scene (in which Gus Van Sant’s Milk is secretly dubbed into Farsi) but the twentysomething leads are too glamorous to convince as schoolgirls, with some of the fantasy sequences verging on softcore porn.

There’s also a risible plot strand that sees Atafeh’s fundamentalist brother rigging up the house with multiple surveillance cameras.